Today, Russia is considered to be the center of National Bolshevism, and almost all of the National Bolshevik parties and organizations in the world are connected to it. Amongst the leading practitioners and theorists of National Bolshevism are Aleksandr Dugin and Eduard Limonov, who leads the unregistered and banned National Bolshevik Party (NBP) in Russia.[2] Influenced heavily by the idea of geopolitics, current Russian National Bolshevik movements propose a merger between Russia, Europe and parts of Asia, in a union to be known as Eurasia.

Karl Radek wanted some of the right-wing nationalists he had met in prison to unite with the Bolsheviks in the name of National Bolshevism. He saw in National Bolshevism a way to "remove the capitalist isolation" of the Soviet Union.[1] Radek had been influenced by the earlier ideas of Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim, two Hamburg-based dissident communists whose ideas about a Germany-Soviet Union alliance in a nationalist war against the United States and the United Kingdom he had previously criticised.[6]

In Russia, as the civil war dragged on, a number of prominent "Whites" switched to the Bolshevik side because they saw it as the only hope for restoring greatness to Russia. Amongst these was Professor Nikolai Ustrialov, initially an anti-communist, who came to believe that Bolshevism could be modified to serve nationalistic purposes. His followers, the Smenovekhovtsi (named after a series of articles he published in 1921) Smena vekh (Russian: volte-face), came to regard themselves as National Bolsheviks, borrowing the term from Niekisch.[7]

Similar ideas were expressed by the Evraziitsi party and the pro-Monarchist Mladorossi. Joseph Stalin's idea of "socialism in one country" was interpreted as a victory by the National Bolsheviks.[7]Vladimir Lenin, who did not use the term 'National Bolshevism', identified the Smenovekhovtsi as a tendency of the old Constitutional Democratic Party who saw Russian communism as just an evolution in the process of Russian aggrandisement. He further added that they were a 'class enemy' and warned against communists believing them to be allies.[8]The movement attracted many party members[clarification needed] but was itself an intellectual current and not a political party. Lunacharsky supported it[specify] while Zinoviev and Bukharin condemned it. Stalin condemned it in 1923.

Ustrialov and others sympathetic to the Smenovekhovtsi cause, such as Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy and Ilya Ehrenburg, were eventually able to return to the Soviet Union and, following the co-option of aspects of nationalism by Stalin and his ideologue Andrei Zhdanov, enjoyed membership of the intellectual elite under the designation "non-party" Bolsheviks.[9] Similarly B.D. Grekov's National Bolshevik school of historiography, a frequent target under Lenin, was officially recognised and even promoted under Stalin, albeit after accepting the main tenets of Stalinism.[10] Indeed it has been argued that National Bolshevism was the main impetus for the revival of patriotism as an official part of state ideology in the 1930s.[11]

The term National Bolshevism has sometimes been applied to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and his brand of anti-communism.[12] However, Solzhenitsyn cannot be labeled a National Bolshevik since he was thoroughly anti-Marxist and anti-Stalinist, and he wished a revival of Russian culture that would see a greater role for the Russian Orthodox Church, a withdrawal of Russia from its role overseas, and a state of international isolationism.[12] Solzhenitsyn and his followers, known as vozrozhdentsy (revivalists) differed from the National Bolsheviks, who were not religious in tone (although not completely hostile to religion), and who felt that involvement overseas was important for the prestige and power of Russia.[12]

There was open hostility between Solzhenitsyn and Eduard Limonov, the head of Russia's unregistered National Bolshevik Party. Solzhenitsyn had described Limonov as "a little insect who writes pornography", and Limonov described Solzhenitsyn as a traitor to his homeland who contributed to the downfall of the USSR. In The Oak and the Calf, Solzhenitsyn openly attacked the notions that the Russians were 'the noblest in the world' and that 'tsarism and Bolshevism ... [were] equally irreproachable', defining this as the core of the National Bolshevism to which he was opposed.[13]